Derek Loosvelt

Derek Loosvelt is Vault's senior finance editor. Derek has a BS in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in creative writing from the New School. His writing has appeared in several online and print publications. Previously, he worked in investment banking as an M&A analyst and associate.

All Posts by Derek Loosvelt

With the proliferation of the virtual marketplace and crowdfunding
sources, it's not surprising to learn that today it's easier than
ever to start a business and get it funded. It's also not
surprising that since there are more new businesses than ever,
there are more failed businesses than ever, too. But what is
surprising (at least to me) is that studies show that failure
doesn't equal learning experience in the startup world. In fact,
failure isn't an indicator of future success but of...
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I live in Brooklyn, and this past weekend, at my local independent
bookstore, where the titles that typically move are those written
by the many novelists who live in the outer borough, front and
center in the store window and on the checkout counter was the new,
Bible-thick, nonfiction title Capital in the Twenty-First Century,
by French economist Thomas Piketty. Capital, if you haven't heard,
has been receiving a ridiculous amount of praise. Nobel
Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has...
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There's a very good chance that right now you're seated in a
swiveling, ergonomic chair on wheels, staring at a computer screen,
reading these digital words within three or four flimsy chest-high
walls, just beyond which is another person who's seated in a
swiveling, ergonomic chair on wheels, staring at a computer screen,
reading other digital words within three or four flimsy chest-high
walls, just beyond which is another person … and so on, and so on,
and so on. That is, there's a good...
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If the Roman Catholic Church were a public company, its share price
would have doubled in the past year and its CEO would now be in a
strong position to ask the board for a raise. This is more or less
what The Economist implied last week when it published an
article called "The Francis Effect," comparing the Pope to great
turnaround CEOs "such as IBM's Lou Gerstner, Fiat's Sergio
Marchionne, and Apple's Steve Jobs." The subhead of the article
reads, "About to take over a crisis-ridden...
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Three years ago, just after the Deutsche Bank-owned Cosmopolitan
hotel and casino opened in Las Vegas, I spoke with a Vegas insider
about the German bank's big Sin City bet (you can read part of that
conversation in a previous post here). And last week, just
after news broke that Germany's largest bank had put the
Cosmopolitan up for sale, I caught up with the same Vegas insider
(who's worked and lived on and around the Strip for nearly 15
years) to ask him, among other things, why the...
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This past Easter Sunday marked the third anniversary of the death
of Chris Hondros, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated photojournalist who
was killed in 2011 while on assignment in Libya. Hondros, who spent
most of his career documenting war, took photographs that according
to Mother Jones are "critically important in our understanding
of what's going on in the world [and] critical in getting people to
pay attention." Earlier this month, Powerhouse Books published a
book of Hondros' photos and...
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Earlier this week it was revealed that Google, which already
occupies 750,000 square feet of office space in New York, is on the
hunt for 600,000 more. The tech firm wants the space to house
another 3,000 employees in New York. When I mentioned this to a
coworker, she joked: So, does that mean I should work on my resume?
Perhaps it does, I replied, and it also means that you better
lock-in your lease as fast as you can, because 3,000 more Googlers
in Manhattan (and Brooklyn) can only mean...
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Today we celebrate Tax Day with the release of the latest Vault
Accounting 50, a ranking of the best accounting employers to work
for in North America. Recently, we asked more than 10,000
accountants to rate their peer firms in terms of prestige; we also
asked them to rate their own firms in numerous workplace
categories, including culture, work/life balance, hours,
compensation, training, overall satisfaction, and business outlook.
And in this year's Accounting 50-which takes into account...
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For a long time, Wall Street knew this day was coming. And now,
Michael Lewis and Main Street know it, too. In the very near
future, no longer will the sharpest blue-blooded, type A,
squash-playing, financially-driven Ivy League graduate with
excellent complexion rule the trading desks of Wall Street's
largest and most-storied institutions. Instead, it will be the most
creative and innovative IT guy (or gal) who'll be calling all the
shots. And here's Michael Lewis, speaking on Bloomberg...
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In the trailer for the new HBO series "Silicon Valley," which
premiers Sunday April 6th, one of the superstar programmers at the
center of the show is mumbling his way through a description of his
tech venture when he's mistakenly called out as someone with
Asperger's. Although the scene plays for laughs, it perhaps
underscores the very unfunny fact that today more than 3 million
Americans suffer from some form of autism. And, according to a
recent study pointed out by the Wall Street...
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